One of the most difficult aspects of chess for many players is deciding when to exchange pieces. There is no simple formula, as whether and what to exchange depends on the specific features of each position. We don’t intend to address this demanding topic in detail in this chapter, which is why it will be short.
The purpose of exchanging
Once players reach a certain level of understanding, they will at least have heard of the various reasons for exchanging pieces:
It is easy to find exceptions to all these principles:
So you could write a whole book on this topic, and people have. In the end, it comes down to this: sometimes you should exchange pieces and sometimes you shouldn’t.
Is bullet different?
Bullet chess is still chess, so players with a better understanding of when and how to exchange pieces will always have an advantage in bullet, just as stronger player will always have an advantage over weaker players. That said, there are some special considerations in bullet which should be kept in mind.
The first is that exchanges, because they involve captures, often are amenable to pre-moving. For example, if rooks are opposed on an open file, it is natural and perfectly safe to pre-move the recapture of your rook, provided you have no better move. If your opponent doesn’t exchange, you’ve lost nothing.
However, you have to be careful if you’re the one making the exchange. It can be dangerous to pre-move based on the assumption that your opponent will automatically recapture. Stronger players will look for “in between moves” which defer recaptures, both to exploit ill-advised pre-moves and to throw their opponents off track if no pre-move has been made. For example, after your opponent captures your knight with a bishop he may pre-move thinking you have to recapture his bishop. If you instead attack his queen, the result may be a red-faced opponent who has to play without a queen.
The second, more important, point in bullet is that exchanges can often make it easier to win on time. We have seen that constant pressure and threats can wear down an opponent, either on the board or on the clock (or both), and players can’t be faulted for pursuing such a strategy right to the end of the game if it is working. The fact is, though, that not every bullet player is able to maintain this level of play for the entire game.
Fortunately, there are other ways to win in bullet. They are less attractive, but no less effective, than checkmating.
A pugilistic parallel
Let’s compare bullet to boxing. It’s always fun to win by a knockout (checkmate), and it’s almost as satisfying when your opponent doesn’t answer the bell at the start of a round (resignation). But if a fight goes the full 15 rounds the judges will decide the outcome, and winning a boxing match even by a split decision counts just as much as a knockout.
If a boxer knows he’s ahead on points going into the final rounds, it may be that all he has to do to win the fight is to avoid losing it. It’s then enough to break even in the last few rounds, because time is on your side.
As we’ve discussed in Chapter 3, time can often be decisive in bullet for a number of reasons. Time is the root cause of many mistakes, and therefore can be said to indirectly affect the result in many games. But when players run out of time, time is the direct cause of defeat. A time advantage may therefore be decisive all on its own.
Whether this is so depends both on the size of the time advantage and on the position. A five-second lead in time after four or five moves in an equal position is significant; a time advantage of six seconds to one second in a dull position where nothing much is happening will be decisive. In normal chess the transmutation of advantages from one form to another is an essential element of strategy. This is also true in bullet chess, but advantages on the clock are every bit as important as advantages on the board (sometimes more so), and that’s where simplification comes in.
Just as the boxer who is ahead on points wants to avoid having anything interesting happen in the last few rounds, a bullet player who is significantly ahead on time should simplify and deaden the position and run the opponent out of time.
In both cases, the one who is ahead will win unless he is knocked out or checkmated. And in both cases, a competitor who lets his emotions run away with him and tries for a knockout or a beautiful mate might find that he has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Japanese game of Go is famous for its aphorisms. One is “rich men don’t pick quarrels.” If you are far ahead on time, simplify the position as much as you can and don’t start unnecessary fights that you can’t finish.
The other side of the coin
It’s wonderful to cruise to victory with a time edge right from the start, but your opponent has a say in this and you will inevitably find yourself behind on time in some games. It isn’t difficult to draw the right conclusion from the above analysis as to what you should do when you’re behind the temporal eight-ball. In boxing, you start swinging; in hockey you pull your goalie; in golf you shoot for the pin. You get the picture.
If you’re significantly behind in time in bullet, don’t exchange pieces, especially queens. Your only hope is checkmate, and you have to have something left to mate with. This is so obvious that readers may wonder why it is worth mentioning, but there are innumerable examples of players mindlessly exchanging pieces when their opponents have twice as much time as they do. One explanation for this is that players sometimes don’t realize that they are behind on time. There’s not much we can say about that – in bullet you always have to know where you stand on the clock. The more common explanation, though, is that players lapse into a resigned depression and exchange simply because it’s objectively the best continuation on the board.
Get over it! If you wanted to play the best moves all the time, you wouldn’t be playing bullet! We all know that if your opponent opposes rooks on an open file it usually isn’t a good idea to give up control of the file just to avoid exchanging, but if you’re down ten or 15 seconds on time your only chance may be to keep the rooks on the board so you can attack.
Bullet is not for the faint at heart. It’s not always possible to play safe. If your only chance is mate, then keep those chances alive, even if it means giving ground to your opponent. If you’re lucky, you’ll be playing someone who hasn’t read this book, and things may turn out fine in the end.
Endings
If you’re ahead on time, simplifying to an ending – even one which is losing on the board – may be the simplest and safest path to victory. If the ending is better for you, you will be safe unless you blunder. If the ending is worse for you, everything may still be fine, depending on how many moves your opponent has to make to mate and how quickly he or she can make them.
Once you get to an ending, a material advantage of a single pawn is often enough to win. The classic description of how to convert a pawn advantage to a win in an ending goes something like this:
The advice usually stops there. Unless there are so few pawns remaining that an extra piece won’t do the job, the defender can safely resign.
In bullet, however, a few more steps must be added:
Pretty obvious stuff, but these last three steps might take another 15 or 20 moves. Just how long it will take to make those moves depends on how much resistance the defender can still offer and how quickly the player with the advantage can move.
Let’s put it this way – there is a big difference between a winning bullet ending and a won one. Like everything thing else in bullet, a winning position is worth nothing, while a won position is worth a full point. If there isn’t enough time to convert an advantage, then there really is no advantage, which is why “lost” bullet endings may well be winning, depending on the clock.
Conclusions
The principles relating to simplification in bullet are themselves fairly simple, although many bullet players are either unaware of them or forget about them in the heat of battle.
If you’re significantly ahead on time, trade pieces and try to get to an ending.
Conversely, if you’re significantly behind on time, keep the pieces on the board and play for complications.
Perhaps the hardest aspect of simplification to grasp is that these principles often apply even if the resulting position is objectively bad. A “losing” ending is a win if the opponent runs out of time and you have even one pawn left.
This brings us to our next chapter, which deals with bullet endings. A word of caution is necessary – in bullet chess endings, not everything is as it seems. Because time is almost always a factor by the time an ending is reached, much of what you know about endings will no longer apply....